Self-Injury Research Foci
CAREERS IN SELF-INJURY
Onset
-how did you first hear about or discover self-injury?
-how did you come to try it yourself?
-what were your initial feelings about and experiences with self-injury?
-how did you initially think about it, give it meaning, rationalize it?
Management
-how did cutting become a more regular behavior?
-did your techniques evolve or change?
-did your feelings about cutting change, the meanings it had for your? The rationalizations you used to make it acceptable?
-how did others react to the scars? [what time period was this in the era of cutting?]
-what sets of accounts did you offer to hide your behavior?
-how did people react to these accounts?
-how did you then react to people’s reactions?
-what effects did this have on you?
-how did this change over time or with the historical stage of self-injury?
-how did your self-injury evolve over time in frequency, depth, severity?
-did you tell any people about your self-injury? Who? How?
-how did others react to you after they found out about your self-injury?
-what is the stigma associated with self-injury?
-What are the consequences of labeling?
-how has this changed as it became more widely known about?
-did any social factors ever influence your cself-injury?
-did you ever go to treatment for your self-injury? What was this like? Effectiveness?
-did you ever have a desire to contact or communicate with other people who self-injured? In person, reading books, cyberspace?
SELF-INJURERS
AS LONERS
CHARACTERISTICS OF LONERS:
No Mutual Association, No Mutual Participation
Becoming deviant
Social isolation
Issues of deviant ideology
EMOTIONS AND SELF-INJURY
Emotions Surrounding Self-Injury
-do your instances of self-injury involve emotions? either the attempt to still an overwhelming array of emotions or the attempt to release clogged up emotions?
-how does your self-injury affect your emotional state? what are the emotions that lead up to the act, occur during the act, and exist after the act?
-do you consider yourself an emotional person?
-how do you manage these emotions?
SELF-INJURY AND THE CYBER-COMMUNITY
Cyber-Use
-how long have you been self-injuring, and when in that process did you go to the web?
-what motivated you to go to the web?
-what are some of the best things about the self-injury cybersites and what are some of the worst?
-what types of use do you make of self-injury cyber sites? which kinds do you frequent?
-do you think visiting cybersites has had any effect on your self-injury?
Cyber-Relationships
-what kinds of interaction do you have with other cyber self-injurers?
-have you formed relationships that you have taken off the cyber chatboards into more private chatting spaces such as IM or email?
-how might cyber-relationships differ from face-to-face relationships? are they more or less intimate? how are they affected by the anonymity of cyberspace?
Cyber-Communities
-do you feel like you belong to any cyber-communities? what do these do for you, mean to you?
-what kinds of support, services, information, or other benefits do you think people, or you, could get from them?
-what is the nature of cyber self-injury communities? fluid and shifting? stable and supportive? small and judgmental? some of each? could you please give your thoughts on how they have elements of these and other characteristics?
-have you noticed certain norms or attitudes in self-injury cyber communities that are similar to or different from those in face-to-face life?
-do people get pissed off at others in cyberworlds?
-what, if any, effect, do you think participation in self-injury cyber-relationships, cyber-communication, or just visiting cybersites has on individuals' self-injury? does it reinforce it?
-how do you regard your self-injury? is it just something you do or does it represent in some way a part of your identity, who you are?
-do you think that people who frequent cybersites are more likely to identify more as self-injurers or not? why?